"The international press made the
battle for Srebrenica sound like Stalingrad. There is
a kind of dialectical relation between the attention
of a great power and the power of the media. It
creates a distortion in our work. What I am trying to
do, without great success, is to correct this
distortion."- Comments by UN Secretary
General Boutros-Boutros Ghali at the time of
Srebrenica's capture by Bosnian Serb troops.

For all intents and purposes the "Srebrenica
Massacre" has become for many advocates of the
"New Interventionism" the sine qua non
of the Western presence in the Balkans. The notion that
the Bosnian Serb Army or Vojska Republike Srpske (VRS)
organized and executed a premeditated slaughter of 7,000
unarmed Bosnian Muslim civilian males has become a
crucial element in portraying Serbs, collectively, as
genocidal aggressors.

However, one need not look too deep, or even to the
Serbian side, for another, non-CNN, perspective on this
chapter of the Balkan story. A completely different
narrative emerges from within the ranks of the Armija
Bosne i Hercegovine (ARBiH), in other words the army of
the US-backed Islamist faction in Bosnia.

There exists strong evidence that the United States
and the pro-American leadership in Sarajevo conspired to
manufacture the appearance of a massacre in Srebrenica
with the ultimate objective of provoking Western
intervention. A precedent for such a scenario is well
documented in the BBC's 'Death of Yugoslavia' in which
Germany is shown to have deliberately engineered the
'fall' of the town of Vukovar in order to gain support
for the neo-fascist Croatian secessionists in late 1991.

About That Odd Tangent in Mr. Annan's Srebrenica
Report

In UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's recently released
report on Srebrenica an astute reader might spot a
curious tangent that is never explored by Annan. This
tangent, and critical omissions within it, hold the key
to understanding the complex nature of events that later
transpired in the Drina Valley in the summer of 1995.

Describing the deliberations of the Izetbegovic regime
over the Contact Group's peace initiative, introduced
aboard the HMS Invincible in the summer of 1993, the UN
Report conveys the following information:

"115. Representatives of the
Bosniac community gathered in Sarajevo on 28 and
29 September to vote on the peace package. A
delegation of Bosniacs from Srebrenica was
transported to Sarajevo by UNPROFOR [UN forces in
Bosnia] helicopter to participate in the debate.
Prior to the meeting, the delegation met in
private with [Bosnian] President Izetbegovic, who
told them that there were Serb proposals to
exchange Srebrenica and Zepa for territories
around Sarajevo. The delegation opposed the idea,
and the subject was not discussed further. Some
surviving members of the Srebrenica delegation
have stated that President Izetbegovic also told
them he had learned that a NATO intervention in
Bosnia and Herzegovina was possible, but could
only occur if the Serbs were to break into
Srebrenica, killing at least 5,000 of its people."(My
emphasis)http://emperors-clothes.com/docs/safe.htm#115

This would normally be a rather strange assertion for
a head of government but it is not so strange coming from
Alija Izetbegovic.It is well established that
Izetbegovic's own party, the SDA, specialized in staged
mortar attacks on civilians which were then blamed on
Bosnian Serb forces. This operational tactic of the
Sarajevo regime's Special Forces (AID) was designed to
gain sympathy and invite NATO intervention on behalf of
the Izetbegovic regime. This strategy has been confirmed
not only by members of the ARBiH but also by many
diplomats in the region, including chief negotiator Lord
Owen and several UNPROFOR force commanders in Bosnia,
such as General Satish Nambiar of India, General Louis
Mackenzie of Canada, and General Michael Rose of Great
Britain.

A similar deceit on the scale of Srebrenica was not
without precedent. As mentioned earlier, an analogous
'sacrifice' had already occurred in Croatia. The ruling
Croatian neo-fascist HDZ had decided, at a critical
juncture in the battle over Vukovar, not to send
necessary reinforcements to the city. This was done on
the instructions of Bonn in order to gain maximum
propaganda value when, as was inevitable, superior
Yugoslav forces retook the city. A similar scenario could
therefore ostensibly be engineered between the Sarajevo
regime and their handlers in Washington in order to
produce a similar propaganda effect.

By mid-1995 the Clinton Administration had already
succeeded in fulfilling major US-foreign policy
objectives in the Balkans by ending the Muslim-Croat War
in Central Bosnia, by forging an anti-Serbian, Muslim-Croat
military and political alliance, by increasing military
support for these pro-Western belligerents, and by
securing UN Security Council approval for limited air-strikes
against Bosnian Serb positions.

However British, French, German and Russian foreign
policy establishments wavered on the question of full-blown
NATO intervention against the Serbs for complex domestic-political
reasons. The already firmly anti-Serbian position of the
Contact Group had to be further instilled in the general
populace before a full-blown NATO intervention could be
launched against the Serbs. Such an intervention would
invariably include changing the 'facts on the ground' and
would involve large-scale Western-backed ethnic-cleansing
of Serbian populations throughout Croatia and large
swaths of Bosnia. In order to sustain such a criminal
enterprise the West needed to demonize the Serbs to such
an extent that their large scale victimization would only
be greeted with, at best, a "now they're getting a
taste of their own medicine" response among the
general public.

Clinton's Modest Proposal

Although Izetbegovic has denied making the above
statement about the possibility of NATO intervention in
the wake of Srebrenicas capture by the Serbian
army, the allegations have persisted in the Bosnian press.
In fact there is an added twist to the story. Thisadditional information
appeared in a June 22nd, 1998 interview with Hakija
Meholjic in the Bosnian weekly DANI. Meholjic had been
Srebrenica's chief of police. Together with Naser Oric he
spearheaded anti-Serbian pogroms in the Drina Valley.
Meholjic was present at the Sept. 28th and 29th, 1993
meetings in Sarajevo. He was present when Serbian forces
took Srebrenica in 1995. According to Meholjic,
Izetbegovic had said:

"'You know, I was offered
by Clinton in April 1993 (after the fall of
Cerska and Konjevic Polje) that the Chetnik
forces enter Srebrenica, carry out a slaughter of
5,000 Muslims, and then there will be a military
intervention.' [Meholjic then continues] Our
delegation was composed of nine people, one among
us was from Bratunac and unfortunately he is the
only one not alive now, but all the others
from the delegation are alive and can confirm
this." (My emphasis. 'DANI', June 22,
1998. The text can be read in English at http://www.cdsp.neu.edu/info/students/marko/dani/dani2.html and in the original Serbo-Croatian at http://www.bhdani.com/arhiva/980678/tekst278.htm )

Thus in contrast with the UN report, it is clearly
stated that none other than US President Bill Clinton had
personally suggested that a "Srebrenica Massacre"
scenario would produce NATO intervention on behalf of the
ARBiH. Hakija Meholjic and the hardcore Srebrenica
militants in the ARBiH to this day insist that "everybody
betrayed us" and are determined to press for an
inquiry.

Srebrenica's Troubled Demons

Although designated a UN protected 'safe-haven' (which
was supposed to mean complete demilitarization) in 1993,
it is abundantly clear that the Srebrenica enclave
continued to be filled with heavily armed ARBiH units
through 1995. Various intelligence reports estimate that
between 1,500-5,000 ARBiH troops were stationed in the
enclave when it was captured by the VRS on July 12, 1995.

The UN protected 'safe-haven' was used as a de facto
launching pad for ARBiH attacks on surrounding Serbian
villages and civilians. Thus the real tragedy was the
UN's failure to protect the entire civilian population of
the Drina Valley by failing to demilitarize the enclave.

The ARBiH units stationed in Srebrenica were quite
militant and uncompromising in their attitude towards
Serbs, whom they invariably viewed as "Chetnik
aggressors". It is not surprising that an alternate
scenario about Srebrenica's fall emerges from the ARBiH
soldiers in the enclave itself. They were instrumental in
spreading fear in the surrounding countryside by carrying
out brutal attacks on undefended Serbian villages. For
these Bosnian Islamist nationalists the whole Srebrenica
scenario that played out in the Western media after the
enclave's fall was profoundly injurious to the
reputations of these 'defenders' of the 'Bosniac' people.

In fact in the days before the enclaves fall, key
figures in Srebrenica were called out of the enclave.
Factional fighting, confirmed by Dutch peacekeepers on
the ground, erupted between ARBiH factions over the
ultimate fate of Srebrenica. The cause of their dispute
was not only whether or not to abandon the town to the
small advancing VRS forces, but also stemmed from complex
political struggles within the ARBiH and the SDA. The
struggle was a result of long-standing tensions between
locally unpopular Izetbegovic loyalists, who took into
consideration the situation in all of Bosnia, and those
local leaders more narrowly committed to 'defending'
Srebrenica. What becomes clear from the picture, however,
was that Izetbegovic was willing to bargain away
Srebrenica in order to achieve full control of Sarajevo (most
of which - barring the Serbian sections - being already
in the hands of his inner-circle). Srebrenica was
therefore politically expendable to Izetbegovic, and it
is increasingly evident that he exploited it for maximum
political advantage. With one deft political maneuver he
could not only eliminate popular elements within his own
party that werent beholden to his directives but at
the same time invite Western military intervention
against the hated 'Chetnik aggressor'.

In a January 18th, 1999 interview with
'DANI', Nesib Buric, former member of an ARBiH battalion
stationed in Srebrenica, and now Deputy Mayor for Social
Security of War Veterans and Disabled Persons in
Srebrenica, clearly summed-up the perspective of the
local Srebrenica faction within the ARBiH:

"I know that they are now
trying to humiliate people from Srebrenica and
spread rumors that we supposedly did not fight
and were slain while running away from Srebrenica.
No one can deny that in the Srebrenica
municipality there are 2,000 buried fighters.
No one can deny that we set up a large free
territory. However, without assistance from
outside we could not hold out for long surrounded
by the enemy. You can write that I absolutely
support the statement by Hakija Meholjic that we
were betrayed. Why does not someone refute
his assertions with arguments? Instead they are
using slander and saying that Hakija was like
this and like that. Hakija was among the first
people in Srebrenica to pick up a rifle and work
on the organization of the resistance. Therefore,
he has the right to speak up. Ibran Mustafic
and those women do not have the right to make
lists for the Hague Tribunal. They do not have
any evidence for that. In Srebrenica, Ibran
refused to fight and lead a brigade, but turned
to his prewar flirt with politics. As far as
Hakija is concerned, you can write that every
single child from Srebrenica agrees with his
statement." ( My emphasis. English
translation of the text from 'DANI' can be read
at http://www.cdsp.neu.edu/info/students/marko/dani/dani6.html Original text in Serbo-Croatian can be
read at http://www.bhdani.com/arhiva/1999/93/tekst393.htm )

In short the Islamist veterans from Srebrenica make a
three-fold claim, that:

1) A high-level political decision was made
between the leadership in Sarajevo and the Clinton
Administration on the fate of the Srebrenica enclave,

2) That the ARBiH militants in the enclave were
betrayed by the Izetbegovic regime during the
critical days in mid-June 1995 when the enclave was
recaptured by the Bosnian Serb army, and that

3) Those killed in Srebrenica were ARBiH soldiers
who died during firefights while defending their
positions, not fleeing civilians.

Any version of events that doesn't seriously consider
this perspective on Srebrenica is designed to
deliberately mislead public opinion on the dynamics of
the conflict in the Balkans. By obscuring the real facts
and presenting a simple scenario about Srebrenica, the
Western foreign policy establishment and media have
designed a narrative with the sole objective of
demonizing the Serbs and justifying the continued
existence of NATO and its presence within the Balkans.

The description of events described above, however,
suggests a much more complex scenario. It becomes
increasingly evident that there was a conscious decision
made in Sarajevo to abandon the enclave's "defenders"
and extract maximum propaganda value by presenting their
defeat as a massacre of helpless people. Furthermore, the
distinct possibility that the Clinton Administration was
intimately involved in this decision - and the precedent
set by Germany and Croatia in Vukovar - suggest the
profound control by Western nations over the decision and
war-making apparatus of the secessionist republics during
key phases of Yugoslavia's dismemberment. The fact that
the Western media has only played a marginal role (and
even then with giant time-lags) in exposing the foreign
policy machinations of our elites further underlines the
current profound crisis of democracy in advanced
industrialized countries.

***

Further reading on Srebrenica:

Below is an interesting group of
articles on Srebrenica, involving a dispute with 'NY
Times' Srebrenica specialist, David Rohde.

David Rohde, Srebrenica and the New Justiceby Jared Israelat http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/jared/fulltext.htm
The above is the latest in an ongoing battle with David
Rohde from the 'NY Times.' Remember Rohde? He wrote the
original Srebrenica massacre story when he was a lowly
Christian Science Monitor reporter back in 1995; in
return for making loud (if unsubstantiated) accusations
against the Bosnian Serbs he landed a perch at the 'NY
Times' from which he issues Srebrenica updates whenever
NATO wishes to prepare public opinion for some new attack
on Yugoslavia.

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